We promote the use of plain English on GOV.UK. We advocate simple, clear language. Terms like eg, ie and etc, while common, make reading difficult for some. Anyone who didn’t grow up speaking English may not be familiar with them. Even those with high literacy levels can be thrown if they are reading under stress or are in a hurry - like a lot of people are on the web.

Of course, now that my desire to purge plain English of Latinisms has won this small victory, my horizons are expanding. A number of economists apparently have a psychological need to write "ex ante" and "ex post," rather than using the vocabulary of commonplace words that describe sequences in either temporal or expectational terms, including "beforehand" or "expected" or "before the fact," as well as "afterwards" or "realized" or "occurred later." And yes, these issues actually raise the blood pressure of pedants like me.